Raja Miah, chief executive of Collective Spirit Multi-Academy Trust (pictured in 2003, when he was working for Peacemaker, a charity he co-founded).
Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

An academy trust has paid out almost £700,000 over two years to a firm owned by its chief executive, Education Guardian can reveal.

The payments are disclosed in annual accounts for Collective Spirit free school in Oldham and Manchester Creative Studio – both owned by the Collective Spirit Multi-Academy Trust – which between them had only 284 pupils at the time of the government’s latest data collection, in January 2016.

Together, the two schools paid £556,848 in 2014-15, and £147,105 in 2013-14 to a firm called Collective Community Partnerships UK CIC (CCP), a company set up by the trust’s chief executive, Raja Miah, in 2012. A document filed at Companies House lists him as the only shareholder.

The multi-academy trust (Mat) said that the payments were made to Miah’s company only after a competitive tendering process had failed to come up with other firms that could provide the services cheaply. The Mat is no longer using the firm – it was wound up last month.

Accounts for Collective Spirit said the school paid Miah’s firm £80,000 for “extended curriculum” provision, £39,996 for “transport” and £28,000 for marketing, in a list of 19 separate items.

Manchester Creative Studio’s accounts list 21 categories of expenditure to CCP, including £63,624 on secondments, £30,400 on catering supplies and £30,000 on marketing. The Mat said Miah did not receive a salary for his role as chief executive of the Collective Spirit Multi-Academy Trust in 2014-15.

In a statement, Collective Spirit said that the payments to CCP were highlighted to the Department for Education (DfE) in annual accounts in line with regulations. It added: “CCP undertook responsibility for services confirmed in the accounts after both schools failed to appoint contractors in their supply chain. Potential service providers did not take up the opportunity to tender or, when they did, did so at rates far higher than we had allocated budgets for. All relationships ceased with CCP as of 31 August 2015.”

Miah was awarded an MBE in 2004 for the work of a charity he co-founded, Peacemaker, which brought white and Asian youngsters together after riots in Oldham in 2001. It closed in 2011.

£3,000 a day charged by chair of trustees

A company set up by the chair of trustees of another academy chain was paid more than £3,000 a day for consultancy services. Aspirations Unlimited International (AUI), founded by the US academic Dr Russ Quaglia received the money from the west London-based Aspirations Academies Trust (AAT) – where he is a co-founder and chair of trustees – for UK consultancy work carried out over at least two years.

Taxpayers fund large wages and lavish perks of academy school chiefs

Read more

The figures come from documents provided for the recent Channel 4 Dispatches documentary on academies, which have been passed to Education Guardian.

AUI was paid £89,724 in 2013-14 and £89,514 in 2014-15 for services, which included using a range of student and staff surveys it has developed. The figures also include travel, accommodation and meals for Quaglia during at least six visits to the UK each year, and his consultancy fees.

Government rules say academies buying services from “related parties” – companies associated with those running an academy trust – must be “at cost”, so that no profit is made. A November 2014 document released under freedom of information, written by Quaglia, sets out these “at-cost” calculations.

His travel bills equated to $49,800 (£38,300) for six trips, including $3,000 a trip for “hotel and meals”. The total charged by AUI for 2013-14 was $148,942 – Quaglia’s consultancy work alone cost $79,142, or $5,276 a day for the 15 days.

Simon Pink, AAT’s director of finance, said other staff from AUI were provided free alongside Quaglia, and that they could have been included in the calculations to reduce Quaglia’s reported costs. “We could easily add in the costs of other people who support us and correspondingly reduce Dr Quaglia’s costs if we were concerned about how this might play in the media,” he said. “However, as the calculation was done for the auditors and the DfE, we rather naively did not.”

Quaglia was in “high demand around the world” and had been paid £10,000 for a 40-minute speech at a Specialist Schools and Academies Trust conference in Manchester last year, he added. Pink also said that, overall, AAT schools were paying only $7,500 each for improvement support from Quaglia’s US operations. This was much better value for money than local authorities provided.

• A diary item was removed on 28 November 2016 and a correction published.